The Day We Went to War (15 page)

6.00pm, B
ROADCASTING
H
OUSE

The BBC tells listeners that it is merging its national and regional programmes and will in future broadcast only one programme – the Home Service. The mobilisation of Air Raid Precautions personnel is also announced in the news this evening.

6.00pm, H
OUSE OF
C
OMMONS
, W
ESTMINSTER

The Speaker arrives and prayers are said. The House’s chaplain adds one of his own today, ‘Let us this day pray for wisdom and courage to defend the right.’

6.00pm (7.00pm), A
DLON
H
OTEL
, U
NTER
D
EN
L
INDEN
, B
ERLIN

Air-raid sirens sound the warning. Virginia Cowles’s first thought is that it is the Royal Air Force coming over. From her balcony she sees cars stopping and people running in every direction. People hurry into the hotel lobby from the street to find shelter. An elderly German asks Virginia if she has been in an air raid before. She tells him that she was bombed several times by German ’planes during the Spanish Civil War. He relapses into silence.

6.00pm (7.00pm), E
SPLANADE
H
OTEL
, B
ERLIN

Jack Raleigh is working in the
Chicago Tribune
bureau as the alert sounds. Not relishing the thought of being buried alive, he decides not to go to the shelter in the hotel’s sub-basement. He carries on working. Raleigh hears two air-raid wardens talking. One tells the other that this is no practice alarm. A Luftwaffe officer has told the warden that seventy Polish bombers are on their way to Berlin. Raleigh carries on working, but confesses to himself that he wants to hear ‘the All Clear signal more than anything else in life’.

6.00pm (7.00pm), B
ERLIN
-S
TEGLITZ

Ruth Andreas-Friederich is having tea with a judge who has been pensioned off by the Nazis. Both Ruth and her host loathe Hitler and his regime, and they are speculating on what will now happen. Then suddenly they hear ‘a strange sound . . . up and down, down and up, a long drawn howl’. It is the air-raid warning. They quickly go downstairs to cellar

6.15pm, F
OREIGN
O
FFICE
, W
HITEHALL

Lord Halifax has just finished composing his statement for the House of Lords at 6.30pm. Walking over to Parliament, the deeply religious Foreign Secretary asks Oliver Harvey, ‘How can a man be so wicked to launch this?’

6.15pm, H
OUSE OF
C
OMMONS

The Prime Minister and Labour’s acting leader Arthur Greenwood enter the chamber together and receive a cheer from MPs. Chamberlain rises immediately. In a voice full of emotion he reminds MPs, ‘About eighteen months ago in this House I prayed that the responsibility might not fall upon me to ask this country to accept the awful arbitrament of war.’ The Prime Minister then tells the House how the Government has made it crystal clear to Nazis that, if they use force, then, ‘we were resolved to oppose by them force’. Raising his voice and striking the despatch box in front of him with a clenched fist, Chamberlain continues, ‘We shall stand at the bar of history knowing that the responsibility for this terrible catastrophe lies on the shoulders of one man. The German Chancellor has not hesitated to plunge the world into misery to serve his own senseless ambition.’

The Prime Minister now explains the course of events over the last few days. When he slowly reads the text of the warning note that Sir Nevile Henderson has been instructed to hand to von Ribbentrop, it is clear that Chamberlain is ‘in real moral agony’. There is a feeling of deep sympathy for him in the House. Recovering, the Prime Minister ends on a defiant note: ‘Now it only remains for us to set our teeth and to enter upon this struggle, which we have so earnestly endeavoured to avoid, with determination to see it through to the end. We shall enter it with a clear conscience, with the support of the Dominions and the British Empire, and with the moral approval of the greater part of the world.’

Making his way to the Savoy Hotel for dinner, Duff Cooper thinks that Chamberlain was unimpressive. And fellow anti-appeaser Harold Nicolson is afraid that, ‘lobby opinion is rather defeatist and they all realize that we have in front of us a very terrible task’.

6.30pm (7.30pm), H
OTEL
E
UROPEJSKI
, W
ARSAW

In the courtyard of the hotel, diners sit at tables lit by well-shaded lights and eat their meals just ‘as usual in the peaceful summer air’. Warsaw has had seven air-raid warnings today, but there has been little excitement and no bombing of the city centre.

6.45pm (7.45pm), B
ERLIN
-S
TEGLITZ

The ‘All Clear’ sounds. It has been a practice alarm. Ruth and her fellow shelterers emerge from the cellar. Nobody says anything ‘about this new experience; it’s disagreeable and almost makes us feel as if we’d disgraced ourselves’.

7.47pm, B
RITAIN

The blackout comes into force tonight.

9.30pm, S
AVOY
H
OTEL
G
RILL
, T
HE
S
TRAND

Duff Cooper and his wife Lady Diana are dining with Churchill, his son-in-law Duncan Sandys, and Lord Lloyd. Churchill confides to Lady Diana that this afternoon Chamberlain asked him to join the War Cabinet. He also tells her that he will try to get her husband a government post. But Duff Cooper is not at all sure that he wants to serve again under Chamberlain. Or indeed if the Prime Minister wants him back.

9.30pm (10.30pm), F
OREIGN
M
INISTRY
, W
ILHEMSTRASSE
, B
ERLIN

Sir Nevile Henderson arrives to deliver the written British warning. Von Ribbentrop receives it without comment, but tells the ambassador that sole blame rests with the Poles. It was they who mobilised first, and invaded German territory. French ambassador Robert Coulondre has also arrived with a similar communication from Paris. Both men are told by von Ribbentrop that their notes will be submitted to Hitler for a response. When von Ribbentrop takes him the notes, the Fuehrer is derisory. ‘We will now see if they
come to Poland’s aid,’ he tells his staff. Hitler is supremely confident that ‘they’ll chicken out again’.

10.00pm, SS
A
THENIA
OFF
B
LACK
H
EAD
, B
ELFAST

136 more passengers, including sixty-seven Americans, have just joined the ship. The
Athenia
weighs anchor and sets course for Liverpool.

10.00pm, S
AVOY
H
OTEL
, T
HE
S
TRAND

In the blackout, the Coopers leave the hotel. They cannot find a taxi, but the Duke of Westminster, the fabulously rich ‘Bendor’, offers them a lift to Victoria in his Rolls-Royce. As they drive to the station, the Duke inveighs against the Jews and rejoices that Britain is not at war with Germany. Hitler, ‘Bendor’ tells the Coopers, ‘knows that we are his best friends’. Duff Cooper, whose violent temper is notorious, explodes and tells the Duke that he hopes the Fuehrer will ‘soon find out that we are his most implacable and remorseless enemies’.

10.00pm, W
ORTHING

‘Blackouts have started – no one must show a glimmer of light anywhere. Cars have the merest glimmer left and have to be painted white in front, rear or on running boards – the roads have a white centre line and the kerb whitened.’ (Joan Strange)

10.00pm (11.00pm), F
OREIGN
M
INISTRY
, B
ERLIN

Some foreign correspondents, including NBC’s Max Jordan, are hanging about the press department, waiting for any news. They discuss the announcement that has just been made, forbidding Germans to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. Correspondents may still listen, and earlier today Jordan heard a broadcast on the BBC of evacuees, all cheerfully singing ‘The Lambeth Walk’, leaving Waterloo Station.

10.30pm, T
AKELEY

Moyra Charlton is getting ready for bed. The family home is blacked out and the Charltons ‘move like unhappy wraiths in a queer half light’. Before turning in, Moyra brings her diary up to date: ‘Within the next few days we will be at war. It is still even now hardly believable. I think I shall be scared stiff of an air raid. Anyhow, if we live through it, it will be “copy” for the budding author – seeing life with a vengeance, and perhaps death too. Surely a nation has never gone to war so grim and disillusioned and coldly resentful as we are now.’

10.30pm (11.30pm), F
OREIGN
M
INISTRY
, B
ERLIN

Max Jordan and some other correspondents are still waiting around in the press department to see if there is any hope that peace can be preserved. A diplomat tells them, off the record: ‘Yes, there is still hope, but it’s as when a mouse nears a trap – the only hope is that the trap won’t work!’

11.00pm (12.00 midnight), B
ERLIN
-S
TEGLITZ

Anti-Nazi Ruth Andreas-Friederich is on her way home from a meeting with like-minded friends. She reflects on the blacked-out city: ‘On our way we see stars over Berlin for the first time – not paling sadly behind gaudy electric signs, but sparkling with clear solemnity. The moon casts a milky gleam over the roofs of the town. Not a spark of electric light falls upon the street.’

11.30pm, F
OREIGN
O
FFICE
, W
HITEHALL

Lord Halifax returns from seeing Chamberlain. He tells his staff that the Prime Minister has said that nothing can now be done before 9.30 next morning. The Foreign Secretary himself then decides to go to bed.

C
HAPTER
3

Saturday,
2 September 1939

Introduction: resumé of 1 September

As the full force of the German
Blitzkrieg
hit Poland, her allies Britain and France remained in a state of uneasy peace. Only the day before (31 August), a poll in Britain had shown that a large majority of people still thought Hitler was bluffing. Now the mood had changed. With the BBC’s morning bulletins announcing news of the German invasion, the commonest remarks heard were, ‘Let’s get started,’ or ‘Let us strike and get right into Germany’.

Mass Observation diarists recorded their own emotions and those of friends and family. A twenty-five-year-old woman wrote: ‘Had been expecting it. Whole world turned upside down. Everybody grey and serious, but making cynical jokes. Didn’t sleep very well.’ A seventeen-year-old boy noted, ‘All decided very little hope left. All very worried. Go on working as usual. Parents have anti-German outburst.’

Throughout Britain’s town and cities, the evacuation of school-children and others took place. There was a good deal of forced
cheerfulness, and also a lot of tears, but for many children it was all a glorious lark.

French radio stations announced the news of the German invasion of Poland at 10am on 1 September. Already towns, cities and localities were being evacuated. In Paris, Simone de Beauvoir saw ‘an endless procession of cars crammed with luggage and children’. She noted, ‘the disturbing nature of the news is not overemphasized, but no one takes a hopeful line, either.’ Most French people were only too conscious of the fact that their country had been invaded by Germans three times in the last 125 years, and that the last time France had lost nearly 1,400,000 dead. At railway stations, conscripts, on the way to rejoin their regiments, mingled with refugees. At the Quai d’Orsay, Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet persisted in his increasingly futile efforts to preserve the peace by pushing for the conference proposed by the Italians. Like many Parisians, Simone de Beauvoir found sleep difficult that night, experiencing, ‘a feeling of unfathomable horror’.

In Berlin, anti-Nazi Ruth Andreas-Friederich recorded the events of 1 September in her diary:

‘At 4.45 German troops crossed the Polish frontier on a broad front. The government has popped up with an abundance of new decrees. Streets, shops and dwellings to be blacked out. Compulsory air-raid duty. As of today listening to foreign radio stations is forbidden under severe penalties.’

Many Germans believed that the invasion of Poland would be only a ‘localised police action’, and that Britain and France would not fulfil their obligations and go to war. ‘They are afraid to fight Germany,’ a Berlin policeman told US Embassy official William Russell. Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag was a ‘weak one’, according to former ambassador Ulrich von Hassell, received with only ‘official enthusiasm’. At night, Berlin’s restaurants, cafés and beer halls were all packed, but many Berliners feared that the Poles might attempt a bombing raid.

The Polish air force began 1 September with 392 serviceable aircraft. Facing them were 1941 ’planes of the Luftwaffe. The Germans flew 2700 sorties over Poland in the course of the day, attacking airfields and bombing over 100 cities and towns. The ancient town of Ciechanow was attacked three times; twenty-two civilians including one child and four soldiers were killed and over fifty injured. In the capital, Ed Beattie noted, ‘Warsaw was taking the start of the war with the same stolidity and the same fatalism she had shown in the summer months of tension.’ At the same time, Poles waited impatiently for some positive action from Britain and France. ‘Do they know in the west how quickly and hard they must attack?’ a newspaper editor asked Beattie. ‘We can do our part with help, but there must be two fronts.’

12.00 midnight, B
ERLIN
–C
OLOGNE
T
RAIN

Virginia Cowles and her friend Jane Leslie are making their way to Holland before the borders close. They decide to find out what their travelling companions think of the situation, and what they believe Britain and France will do. ‘Germany is only taking police action,’ one
Hausfrau
assures the two Americans. ‘No one will go to war for that.’ A musician from Duesseldorf agrees. ‘After we cut Poland’s throat,’ he tells them, drawing his finger across his own throat, ‘we’ll settle down to peace again.’ Everybody laughs, and Virginia and Jane marvel that everyone is so confident that Hitler is going to pull it off again.